Daniel S. Hamermesh is Edward Everett Hale Centennial Professor of Economics at the University of Texas at Austin. His A.B. is from the University of Chicago (1965), his Ph.D. from Yale (1969). He taught from 1969-73 at Princeton, from 1973-93 at Michigan State. He has held visiting professorships at universities in North America, Europe, Australia and Asia, and lectured at universities in 43 states and 20 foreign countries. His research, published in over 70 refereed papers in scholarly journals, has concentrated on labor demand, time use, social programs, and unusual applications of labor economics (to suicide, sleep and beauty).

Hamermesh is a Fellow of the Econometric Society, a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, Program Director at the Forschungsinstitut zur Zukunft der Arbeit (IZA), and Past President of the Society of Labor Economists and of the Midwest Economics Association. His magnum opus, Labor Demand, was published by Princeton University Press in 1993, and his labor economics textbook, The Economics of Work and Pay, has been through various editions since 1984. In 2003 McGraw-Hill Irwin published his Economics Is Everywhere, a series of 400 vignettes designed to illustrate the ubiquity of economics in everyday life and how the simple tools in a microeconomics principles class can be used.